Scott
Goebel's 05-24-04 Bowling Ball Launch
Watch video of Scott's Bowling Ball Rocket
Watch video of Scott's second Bowling Ball flight on 06-06-04
The second ever bowling ball rocket has flown at Richard Bong state recreation area.
This one is no little 8# bowling ball we went for the whole salami. A 16# ball!
The rocket is the fruit of six months of hard work by Venture crew 242. The kids provided slave labor and I helped design the rocket.
It is four inches in diameter, 74 inches tall, built minimum diameter to take a future K650 or K458. The ball is the nose cone. The PML phenolic parts are all fiberglassed using 6oz. glass and west systems epoxy. The fins are glassed 1/4" plywood and are glassed to the airframe with five fiberglass layups plus fillets. The rocket weighs in at 27# 7oz. ready to fly less motor. It used an eight foot parachute for the ball and a 54" chute for the booster.
We flew the rocket at Bong tonight (with all the proper permissions and waivers). The rocket was guided on it's first 12' of travel by the infamous Gabe Kolesari boat trailer pad. The first flight was on a K1100. The rocket used a Gwiz LC deluxe 800 and a PML timer for a back up. The flight was straight as an arrow with a picture perfect deployment and landing. Each electronic device had it's own black powder charge. The Gwiz activated it's charge first at a nice slow horizontal, wonderful. The timer charge could be seen a couple of seconds after apogee. I kept the charges from setting each other off by enclosing them in plastic film cases wrapped up in HD aluminum foil. The rocket flew to 1946' which was pretty close to the rocksim prediction of 1945'. In fact that is about as close as you can come to perfect. Congratulations to Tim Van Milligan. The rocket booster landed within 100yards of the pad but that eight foot chute proved to be rather large for the ball. It drifted off onto the runway. We launched from parking lot "E" because the runway is closed due to the wet conditions.
I'm considering launching it again on June 6th at our contest / sport launch. Dean Roth has offered up another K1100 for the rocket's second flight.
Thanks go out to my helpers at
the launch. Dean Roth, Fred Jarosch, Dean Gelinskey, David Sutton, and Gabe
Kolesari.
The Venture crew members who built the rocket should also receive their credit
where credit is due: Adam, and Emily Goebel, CJ, and Zak Torosian, JJ Bradley,
Adam, and Tony Stefka, Joe Metz, and Missy Stachow. Venture crew 242 is mentored
by Kevin Bradley, Chuck Torosian, David Sutton, and Scott Goebel.
Best to all,
Scott Goebel
WOOSH president
Venture crew 242 Advisor
P.S. If you would like to see pic's of the rocket go to the wooshrocketry.org
web site. Go into the miscellaneous photos section to find my photos of the
rocket.